The United States Department of Agriculture revealed its new and long-anticipated food pyramid in April, to some mixed reviews. One of its biggest critics is Dr. Walter Willett, head of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health. Dr. Willett has updated his 2001 best seller, “Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy,” to reflect the problems he sees with USDA’s food pyramid and to give alternatives for healthy eating suggestions based on his own food pyramid. Check out an excerpt from Harvard University's nutrition guide here:
We eat to live.
It's a simple, obvious truth. We need food for the basics of everyday life — to pump blood, move muscles, think thoughts.
But we can also eat to live well and live longer. By making the right choices, you will help yourself avoid some of the things we think of as the inevitable penalties of getting older. A healthy diet teamed up with regular exercise and no smoking can eliminate 80 percent of heart disease and 70 percent of some cancers. Making poor choices — eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and too little of the right kinds, or too much food altogether — increases your chances of developing cancer, heart disease, diabetes, digestive disorders, and aging-related loss of vision. An unhealthy diet during pregnancy can even cause some birth defects.
Separating what's good from what's bad can be a discouraging task. Each day you have to choose from an ever increasing number of foods and products, some good, most not so good. Maybe the time you have to prepare food, or even to eat, seems to shrink by the month. To make matters worse, you may feel overwhelmed by contradictory advice on what to eat. Your daily newspaper or TV newscast routinely serves up results from the latest nutrition studies. Magazines trumpet the hottest diets complete with heartfelt testimonials. One new diet or nutrition book hits the bookshelves every other day. Even supermarkets and fast-food restaurants offer advice, as do cereal boxes and a sea of Internet sites. This jumble of information quickly turns into nutritional white noise that many people tune out.
This Healthy Eating pyramid is based on science You deserve more accurate, less biased, and more helpful information than that found in the USDA Pyramid. I have tried to collect exactly that in the Healthy Eating Pyramid. Without question, I have the advantage of starting with a lot more information than the USDA Pyramid builders had ten years ago. Equally important, I didn't have to negotiate with any special-interest groups when it came time to design this Pyramid.
The Healthy Eating Pyramid isn't set in stone. I don't have all the answers, nor can I predict what nutrition researchers will turn up in the decade ahead. But I can give you a solid sense of state-of-the-art healthy eating today and point out where things are heading. This isn't the only alternative to the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. The Asian, Latin, Mediterranean, and vegetarian pyramids promoted by Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust are also good, evidence-based guides for healthy eating. But the Healthy Eating Pyramid takes advantage of even more extensive research and offers a broader guide that is not based on a specific culture.
About the only thing that the Healthy Eating Pyramid and the USDA Food Guide Pyramid share is their emphasis on vegetables and fruits. Other than that, they are different on almost every level. In the chapters that follow, I will lay out the evidence that shaped this blueprint for healthy eating and will also chart out extra information to help people with special nutritional needs get the most benefit from what they eat. These people include pregnant women, older people, and people with, or at high risk of, heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and some other chronic conditions.
For now, though, the following list of the seven healthiest changes you can make in your diet offers an overview that describes how the Healthy Eating Pyramid differs from the USDA Pyramid. Topping the list is controlling your weight.
Watch your weight
When it comes to long-term health, keeping your weight from creeping up on you is more important than the exact ratio of fats to carbohydrates or the types and amounts of antioxidants in your food. The lower and more stable your weight, the lower your chances of having or dying from a heart attack, stroke, or other type of cardiovascular disease; of developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes; of being diagnosed with postmenopausal breast cancer, cancer of the endometrium, colon, or kidney; or of being afflicted with some other chronic condition. Yes, it is possible to be too thin, as in the case of anorexia nervosa, but otherwise very few American adults fall into this category.
Eat fewer bad fats and more good fats
One of the most striking differences is the placement of healthy fats in the foundation of the Healthy Eating Pyramid instead of relegating all fats to the "Use Sparingly" spot at the top. The message here is almost as simple as the USDA's and far better for you: Fats from nuts, seeds, grains, fish, and liquid oils (including olive, canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, peanut, and other vegetable oils) are good for you, especially when you eat them in place of saturated and trans fat.
The all-fat-is-bad message has started a huge national experiment, with us as the guinea pigs. As people cut back on fat, they usually eat more carbohydrates. In America today, that means more highly refined or easily digested foods like sugar, white bread, white rice, and potatoes. This switch usually fails to yield the hoped-for weight loss or lower cholesterol levels. Instead it often leads to weight gain and potentially dangerous changes in blood fats -- lower high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the so-called good or protective cholesterol, and higher triglycerides (a major type of blood fat).
Substituting unsaturated fats for saturated fats, though, improves cholesterol levels across the board. It may also protect the heart against rhythm disturbances that can end in sudden death.
The bottom line is this: It is perfectly fine to get more than 30 percent of your daily calories from fats as long as most of those fats are unsaturated. The Healthy Eating Pyramid highlights the importance of keeping saturated and trans fats to a minimum by putting red meat, whole-milk dairy products, butter, and hydrogenated vegetable oils in the "Use Sparingly" section at the top.
Eat fewer refined-grain carbohydrates and more whole-grain carbohydrates
The Healthy Eating Pyramid has two carbohydrate building blocks — whole grains that are slowly digested as part of the foundation and highly refined, rapidly digested carbohydrates at the very top.
For almost twenty years our research team has been one of several groups studying the health effects of foods made from refined and intact grains. The result of this work is compelling. Eating lots of carbohydrates that are quickly digested and absorbed increases levels of blood sugar and insulin, raises levels of triglycerides, and lowers levels of HDL cholesterol. Over the long run, these changes lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In contrast, eating whole-grain foods is clearly better for long-term good health and offers protection against diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and gastrointestinal problems such as diverticulosis and constipation. Other research around the world points to the same conclusions.
Choose healthier sources of proteins
In the Healthy Eating Pyramid, red meat occupies the pointy tip to highlight the fact that something about red meat — its particular combination of saturated fats or the potentially cancer-causing compounds that form when red meat is grilled or fried — is connected to a variety of chronic diseases. In this pyramid, the best sources of protein are beans and nuts, along with fish, poultry, and eggs. It separates vegetable and animal protein sources and makes the latter optional for people who want to follow a vegetarian diet.
Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, but hold the potatoes
Vegetables and fruits are essential ingredients in almost every cuisine. If you let them play starring roles in your diet, they will reward you with many benefits besides great taste, terrific textures, and welcome variety. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables will lower your blood pressure, decrease your chances of having a heart attack or stroke, help protect you against a variety of cancers, guard against constipation and other gastrointestinal problems, and limit your chances of developing aging-related problems like cataracts and macular degeneration, the most common causes of vision loss among people over age sixty-five. I've plucked potatoes out of the vegetable category and put them in the "Use Sparingly" category because of their dramatic effect on levels of blood sugar and insulin.
Use alcohol in moderation
When the first reports appeared linking moderate alcohol consumption with lower rates of heart disease, many scientists thought that some other habit shared by drinkers, not the drinking, accounted for the benefit. Today the evidence strongly points to alcohol itself. Based on the best estimates available, one drink a day for women and one or two a day for men cuts the chances of having a heart attack or dying from heart disease by about a third and also decreases the risk of having a clot-caused (ischemic) stroke.
Like many drugs, alcohol's effects depend on the dose. A little bit can be beneficial. A lot can eventually destroy the liver, lead to various cancers, boost blood pressure, trigger so-called bleeding (hemorrhagic) strokes, progressively weaken the heart muscle, scramble the brain, harm unborn children, and damage lives.
The clear and ever present dangers of alcohol and alcohol addiction make the recommendation of moderate drinking a political hot potato. While I acknowledge the problems with alcohol, I think it is important to point out its possible benefits for middle-aged and older people.
If you don't drink alcohol, you shouldn't feel compelled to start. You can get similar benefits by beginning to exercise (if you don't already) or boosting the intensity and duration of your physical activity, in addition to following the eating strategy we describe. But if you are an adult with no history of depression or alcoholism who is at high risk for heart disease, a daily alcoholic drink may help reduce that risk. This is especially true for people with type 2 diabetes or those with low HDL that just won't budge upward with diet and exercise. If you already drink alcohol, keep it moderate.
Take a multivitamin for insurance
Several of the ingredients in a standard multivitamin — especially vitamins B6 and B12, folic acid, and vitamin D — are essential players in preventing heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and other chronic diseases. At about a nickel a day, a multivitamin is a cheap and effective genuine "life insurance" policy. It won't make up for the sins of an unhealthy diet, but it can fill in the nutritional holes that can plague even the most conscientious eaters. A daily multivitamin is especially important for people who have trouble absorbing vitamins from their food and for those who can't, or don't, get out in the sun every day. A daily multivitamin is also important for people who drink alcohol because it provides extra folic acid. Alcohol interferes with the metabolism of this key vitamin.
Excerpted from "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating" by Walter Willett, M.D. with P.J. Skerrett. Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.